As Detroit Prepares for Clear-Cutting, Signs of Hope

Yesterday an Obama administration-convened task force released what the New York Timescalled “perhaps the most elaborate survey of decay conducted in any large America[n] city,” detailing the pervasiveness of perceived blight in the Motor City. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force surveyed 377,603 properties, and recommended 40,077 for demolition, 38,429 for further review. Task force leader Dan Gilbert set the stakes somewhat colorfully, saying, “Blight sucks the soul out of anyone who gets near it.” In order to fully follow the task force’s clear-cutting recommendations, Detroit would need to spend at least $850 million, almost twice the $450 million the city has already planned to spend on blight.

The Times story, and its accompanying infographics, follow a traditional script in discussing Detroit: staggering back before the enormity of the city’s failure, peering in at the ruin porn lining the city’s streets. Yet even as the city has gone bankrupt, has been placed in the hands of an appointed manager, and now faces the prospect of spending enormous sums it doesn’t have just to tear down tens of thousands of its properties, there are local kernels of hope blossoming out of the void.

In a recent discussion on the EconTalk podcast, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns pushed back against the idea of Detroit as pure desolation:

If you go right now, today, to the core of Detroit, it’s actually one of the most exciting places in the world. And largely because of the absence of government. There’s nobody there telling people: You can’t open this business, or, You have to get a permit to do that or inspections to do this. There are very few barriers for young people to start a business and get things going.

Likewise, the famed New Urbanist architect and urban planner Andrés Duany wrote earlier this year that “Detroit is going to be the next ‘Brooklyn.’ Perhaps not all of Detroit. But certainly a portion of the city has the potential to become as rich and thriving as New York’s trendiest borough.”

How could Detroit, poster child for post-industrial urban decay and dysfunctional governance possibly be characterized as “one of the most exciting places in the world,” or seen as holding—even in part—the potential to rival “New York’s trendiest borough”? Precisely because the city’s governance has collapsed in on itself, and the area is so incredibly cheap. As Duany recounts,

Elsewhere, over the last three decades, there has arisen a regulatory regime so comprehensive that it is impossible even to make a cookie for sale without a certified kitchen, an accessible bathroom, and constant inspections. Almost everywhere else, the slack that once allowed revitalization to evolve organically has been exterminated by bureaucracies.

Because of its bankruptcy, Detroit simply doesn’t have the bureaucratic capacity to enforce its own accumulated tangle of once well-intentioned zoning codes, land-use regulations, and other assortments of red tape. And because the city has been so depressed, for so long, the institutional and financial barriers to entry are remarkably low. As Marohn mentions, “there aren’t the large corporations that are competing and kind of raising up the initial cost of entry. So downtown–like the very core of Detroit–has some really fascinating things going on right now in terms of business startup and economics.” Duany agrees: “Detroit is now the city where the risk-oblivious millennials can get things done.”

Good planning can be important in constructing neighborhoods that give communities the best chance to grow and develop. But sometimes it can be even more important to simply stop suffocating experimentation. As the city, its bankruptcy judge, and the Obama administration’s task force work on large scale efforts to turn the town around once more, Detroit’s best chance at a rebound may come from young, too-dumb-to-know-better millennials flocking to fill the vacuum, and entrepreneurial spirits taking advantage of the opportunity.

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10 Responses to As Detroit Prepares for Clear-Cutting, Signs of Hope

“Elsewhere, over the last three decades, there has arisen a regulatory regime so comprehensive that it is impossible even to make a cookie for sale without a certified kitchen, an accessible bathroom, and constant inspections. Almost everywhere else, the slack that once allowed revitalization to evolve organically has been exterminated by bureaucracies.”

First of all, stores that only sell cookies, and the like, do not have to provide bathrooms for customers. All businesses do have to have bathrooms for employees (is that a bad thing?), and restaurants and other places of food preparation do have to have certified clean and safe kitchens, and there are inspections to enforce that.

Yeah, and? Is that why Detroit went broke? Because its food prep inspection, cleanliness and safety regime was too intrusive? Seems to me that Brooklyn, held up as the model here, was, last time I checked, still part of the City of New York, and that city has safety and cleanliness regimes, backed by inspections, for all food prep businesses, at least as strict as Detroit ever had.

When I buy a cookie in a bakery or store, I damn well want there to be such a regime in place. And, if there isn’t, that is more a sign of a Third World style failed State than it is of anything “vibrant.” And if I eat in an actual restaurant, I want there to be a clean bathroom also subject to an inspection regime.

Rules and regulations were, and are, enacted, for reasons. And, most of the time, that reason is NOT to keep out competition, stop the little guy from opening a business, etc, etc. Rather, unscrupulous and merely lazy business owners will cut corners otherwise, and, in this case, to the detriment of the public health, without them. And, no, I can’t rely on some BS libertarian regime of “private enforcement,” I want and need competent local government.

That Detroit can no longer afford it is hardly a good thing.

Small businesses in general are a grossly overrated, almost fetish object. Particularly those that involve retail operations. No new technology is being invented. The wheel is merely being reinvented. Today’s “new” pizza parlor most likely, if it is a success, does little more than take business away from the existing pizza parlors.

And most small businesses go broke, leaving employees, customers, suppliers, landlords and other creditors in the lurch. As well as having their now vacant storefront contribute to further urban blight.

But the notion that someone opening up a cookie store in Detroit is going to make a damn bit of difference, even if it succeeds, in the big picture, is absurd. Detroit thrived because of Big Business, the auto business, but now its gone.

Selling cookies to one another, like taking in each others’ laundry, is not the basis of an urban economy. A city has to export something (a good, or service or experience), something that other cities can’t produce themselves, to be successful. Detroit used to make cars. That’s why it grew so big so fast. Because the people in Detroit and nearby made cars, and car parts, for the rest of the country. Now, few cars are made in Detroit or nearby. Thus, there is no natural economy, no “export” product.

Detroit is not a college town. Nor is a strong medical center. Pittsburg has revived under the “med and ed,” services, model, but that is not open to Detroit. Other cities perhaps scrape by because they are the site of State governments, but Detroit is not. Detroit has no real tourist trade, either. Its climate is not good, and if one wants to enjoy the Great Lakes, there are literally dozens of places from Minnesota to NY State that are better suited for an outdoor activity focused trip than Detroit. Detroit is the site of some military, cultural and social history, but hardly enough to support a thriving tourist trade.

Lack of regulations and “entrepreneurial spirit” are not going to renew Detroit. Unless the entrepreneurs are really building an urban/regional economy of specialization. Cookie shops, with or without inspections and mandatory bathrooms, did not make Detroit the first time around, and neither did they make Silicon Valley, or Brooklyn. The fancy “artisans” and artists and so forth in Brooklyn make their living selling expensive stuff and services to folks who make their money in one of NYC’s big, “export” businesses, ie Wall Street, Madison Avenue, TV networks, etc. The folks in Silicon Valley make the computer designs and software and hardware that the rest of the country uses. Something like that is what Detroit needs, if it is ever to revive. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps, without cars, there is just no reason for there to be a big city in SE Michigan. To me, that seems at least as plausible as the notion that the lack of entry barriers to small businesses and a failed city governmental regime of proper inspection are going to remake it.

Charles Marohn has an interesting idea of what constitutes a “strong town”:

“If you go right now, today, to the core of Detroit, it’s actually one of the most exciting places in the world. And largely because of the absence of government.”

Places like Somalia and Afghanistan were tremendously exciting for a while, also due to “absence of government.”

“There are very few barriers for young people to start a business and get things going.”

I suppose some of the highest crime rates in America, infrastructure so dilapidated that they can’t even keep the lights on, and a 47% adult illiteracy rate don’t count as “barriers” in this guy’s mind. Good luck attracting entrepreneurs to set up in conditions like those.

I think the article misses out on describing the opportunities immigrants would provide, and get from, today’s Detroit. I think that risk-oblivious group would find the city even more attractive than the millennials, as I believe they would be more willing to raise families in the city, rather than flee when it comes time to have children.

The City of Detroit is about to spend (no doubt someone else’s) money? Oh joy! A sign of hope!

But seriously Mr. Coppage, while it’s a step in the right direction from your endorsement of Mr. Renn’s simultaneously self-refuting and yet disingenuous piece of the other day, it still don’t go nearly far enough.

That is, Renn’s ridiculously disguised argument for revitalization via ever more money to be poured into the ever-blacker holes that are our major urban centers under the rubric of “infrastructure!” was so poor that he himself couldn’t help but refuting it.

But this is somewhat better: Yes, that is, there is an upside to the devastation that cities have inflicted upon themselves; in money terms alone it can be a cheap place to find a home.

And yes certainly it’s a great idea to encourage people to move back by making the opening of small and large shops and businesses and etc. easy and non-regulated out of business.

Yes, that is, given the cheap living and that a city *will* attract those “young, entrepreneurial millennial’s” that you note, as well as other independent-minded free spirits.

But the one thing it won’t do is hold them. Because once they get married and have kids they won’t subject their kids to the one crucial, politically-incorrect-to-mention factor involved here. Just like it won’t attract many young or middle-aged marrieds’ with children out of the ‘burbs and back into the cities.

And that factor, which once again you refuse to confront, and Mr. Renn was somehow blind to, and Mr. Duany too it appears, is the crime and violence and anti-social behavior that people will put up with themselves, but won’t subject their children to.

And those are the people who are the backbone of cities in terms of *not* living in apartments but in all those multiples of real-estate tax-paying 2 and 3 bedroom homes.

So you could re-pave Detroit’s streets with gold, and make their curbs out of platinum, and install hand-hammered copper bridges in Detroit or similar cities that have defaulted on what is their primary obligation to provide law and order and safety and cleanliness and decent schools and all you are going to get is the thugs who have driven out so many of the decent people with children starting to rip up your streets and curbs and bridges and selling them.

And you and make living in a city cheap as can be, and starting up and running a business as similarly cheap and easy to be, but if you are going to allow a state of nature to exist on your streets and in your schools, you are not going to attract what’s still the big chunk of most people back to you.

And it’s so funny this piece picks up on Detroit, whose most recent appearance in the national news that I’ve seen was for the following:

#1.) Average working Joe driving somewhere in Detroit. Poorly if not totally unsupervised kid darts in front of his truck and gets struck in accident caught on tape and which cops say Average Joe could not have avoided. Average Joe, being average, obeys moral and legal strictures and stops to try to render help to child (who, fortunately, only broke a leg). Whereupon a feral gang of 10-20 members or so descends on Average Joe apparently solely due to his color (white), beat him into a coma, and, of course, loot his pants and truck for valuables.

#2.) The funny new name people in the area are calling Detroit: Not “New Jack City,” but “Carjack City” given an apparent recent explosion of same at gas stations. I.e., the thugs who have driven so many decent people out being starved for prey, now have hit on preying on those just passing through but who have to stop for gas.

Detroit has the urban equivalent of mad cow disease. Historically, up until very recently, large drops in population of urban centers have been associated with catastrophes such as wars, fire, or plagues. When a city grows, it grows in rings, yes? But when a city like Detroit loses population, it loses population from all over. Result: the need to provide the same infrastructure but with a far smaller tax base. If Detroit could physically shrink back to the size it was when it originally had its present population level, it would be in far better shape.

Neither unions nor big government killed Detroit. The city was basically dependent upon one industry and that industry, when at its peak in late 1960s, failed to foresee offshore competition. Even worse, when such competition was evident in the 1970s and 1980s, the Big Three took nearly 20 years to respond with competitive products.

Race factors are an important role and yes, unions have a role in Detroit’s decline but too often Big Three caved in to union demands instead of suffering short-term losses strikes would bring.

Hostile state government also has a major role: passing a law allowing city workers to live outside the city, withholding due state aid and most egregiously, not allowing Detroit companies to be legally required to collect city sales tax.

Think about the last law. Republicans in Lansing prevent Detroit companies from being legally required to collect city sales, yet the same companies are required by law to collect state sales tax.

What Detroit really needs to is to secede from Michigan and its hostile, sabotaging Republican government.

Republicans blame Democrats and vice versa. Is anyone going to talk about the elephant in the room? Detroit’s human capital doesn’t look likely to be up to the task of restoring any semblance of Western Civilization.